Rough maybe, Overzealous most definitely. It was a major laps in judgement from all players involved to think they where ready to roll out, and that people even wanted them. In the end I have a feeling that neither will ever gain the marketshare to survive and will go the way of Laserdisks as a rich mans toy while something better suited takes over for the mass market.

I'm sure the blue laser people kept their stats quiet until now too...

Business 101 = supply vs demand
Business 102 = if there is no demand, make one...
Business 103 = Follow the oil company model: Let everyone believe there is plenty of supply, then once they are reliant on your product, highlight the scarcity and jack up the price...
Buisiness 104: Profit......

This has GOT to hurt ps3 availbility. We'll have to see what it ends up doing, in terms of supply, but I can see this really hurting the after xmas sales of that console, and if they're not getting them to market, I'm sure they'll fall out of the public eye.
First Cell, now Blu-ray. Sony's made one too many bad calls here, methinks.

Sheesh, I'm getting tired of posting this link!

http://www.nmeinc.com/index.aspx

Versatile Multilayer Disk. RED LASER TECHNOLOGY! Read that as: cheap, plentiful, and easy to manufacture. If NME comes out with a player/burner by the end of the year and it costs no more than comparable DVD technology it could take a big chunk out of the HD DVD/BR gravy train.

Start with burners/players for the PC market. Get people used to burning 20GB worth of data on CHEAP disks. Then get the studios (the smart ones anyway who don't have a vested interest in "proprietary technologies") to start putting out movies on them and it's down hill from there.

Then again, if HDD's keep getting cheaper and cheaper the whole damn argument may be moot! But if VMD's can reach the near term goal of DVD's, which are going for about a quarter a piece...let see...5GB...carry the one...a NICKEL a Gig. Cheapest hard drives are still 5x that or more. And that's only if you want to deal with mail in rebates! Even if VMD disks come out at a $1 each (keeping with the .05/GB and assuming a 20GB disk) they will still be a viable back up alternative (read: pron storehouse.) I'd love to be able to pick one of these up and have hard copy backups of my 4 computers (as well as having some sort of terabox sometime here in the near future.)

I agree with Falconfire. HD-DVD and Blu-ray are utter crap. They will fail completely and very quickly. Why? First of all, you have to choose between the two. Then, the capacity of the disks is not many times greater than that of regular DVDs. There is almost no media being released on these discs except for a few recent movies. Finally, the players and writers of these discs are incredibly expensive and hard to buy. With 16 GB flash drives around the corner, there is simply no point to buy these disks to store your computer's contents on them. I repeat, these disks are utter crap, and I certainly won't be purchasing anything related to these discs.

Awsome, you forgot another thing - unless you're pretty close to the TV, the difference between 720p and 1080i is negligable. Most consumers won't notice a difference, and unless the price gap closes... well, you know.